Actually, the real object of my affections back then wore BVDs. Most days I could tell anyway. But I thought Jockeys were sexier back then (though I wouldn’t admit it) and so I used a little artistic license there.
Back when I was still trying to convince myself that I wasn’t gay, oddly enough I could tell exactly what kind of underwear a guy was wearing just by getting the slightest glimpse of the waistband…usually in gym class. If I could see enough of the stitching through a guy’s gym shorts, or if he was wearing his pants tight enough, I could tell that way too.
"T.K." used to drive me absolutely nuts whenever he was out on that tennis court. Not only did he wear his gym shorts very tight…tight enough that I could clearly see the lines of his underwear…he’d wear a loose t-shirt that didn’t quite go all the way down his waist. So every time he took a swing at the ball I’d get a glimpse of his stomach…and that little bit of elastic waistband. At 17, it was electrifying. For the life of me I couldn’t turn my eyes away. But I knew I wasn’t sexually attracted to guys.
If you’d asked me anything back then about women’s lingerie I wouldn’t have had clue one. Matter of fact, I still don’t. For a bit of fun…hang out at the Victoria’s Secret at your local shopping mall and watch guys as they walk by. Most of them just can’t not look…even if their wives or girl friends are with them. And some are completely oblivious. That would be me, usually. Too bad there isn’t a men’s equivalent store chain. I’d make it a point to stroll past its window every time I walked in a mall with one.
At the end of episode ten, my libido warns my teenage self that things get more complicated after they invent designer underwear. But it’s a happy complexity…
Many religious homes are very judgmental about homosexuality. Ex-gays go through exaggerated attempts to repress, control and avoid their sexuality—in a way that parallels the dynamics of sexual anorexia. Ex-gays have come to see me talk about believing their homosexual urges were sick and wrong. They believe their homosexuality is a sexual addiction and try to use Patrick Carnes’s model to set boundaries around their “sexual acting out” behavior. They speak of hating themselves for having these homoerotic urges and would never consider acting them out. Instead, they work hard at repressing them. Preoccupied with any feelings toward the same gender, they’re extremely judgmental toward those who do live out their homosexual orientation, sexually and romantically. They tell me they don’t believe me when as I say I’m happy in my life as a gay man.
Ex-gays go to extremes to avoid sexual contact with the same gender, even if it means behaving in hateful ways—such as trying to pass legislation against gays. I strongly believe that those in the forefront of the ex-gay movement suffer from sexual anorexia and self-hatred about homosexuality, which was taught to them as children. So many come from families, cultures, and communities that disdain homosexuality, and have incorporated this to such an extreme that they can never fully actualize themselves as the gays and lesbians they were meant to be and truly are. Along with their true sexual orientation, they have shut down their capacity to be loving and accepting, particular toward other gays and lesbians.
Joe’s site deals with a topic I’ve often thought about…why essentially heterosexual guys have sex with other guys. Joe takes pains at the top of his blog to assure us he’s not doing "reparative therapy"…
This site is about men who have sex with men (MSM) who question their sexual orientation. This is not intended for reparative therapy, religion or pornography. This site is about the many reasons men engage in sexual contact with other men that are not about homosexuality. It will educate readers on the differences between sexual identity, sexual behavior and sexual fantasy.
I say this topic is of interest to me, as a gay man, because I’ve often found myself, irritatingly, on the receiving end of a straight guy’s attentions. In my college years, it occasionally came from other straight friends. Often after they’d just broken up or had a fight with their girlfriends. I always tried to handle those as tactfully as I could, and I’m still friends with some of them all these years later, but it’s demeaning. And especially so when I have to live in a society that treats gay people as second class citizens. Sure buddy…you can have a little fling with me…the day I can wear a wedding ring like yours…
You hear a lot of joking among gay folks about picking up not-so-straight straight guys. In Memphis a couple years ago I was told by a guy working at a gay bookstore, that the community there in Memphis was mostly married men, who had sex with guys on the side. And I was hearing from some friends who’d been on an ocean cruse that the sexual pickings on a gay cruse are vastly more limited compared to that on a regular, mostly heterosexual one. It’s, I’m happy to hear, easier to find a willing straight guy on a mostly straight cruse then a guy on a gay cruse who would cheat on his boyfriend. I’m sure a lot of deeply closeted gay men do that sort of thing. But the fact is that there are essentially heterosexual men who do it too and I’ve never thought that was healthy. I’m finding that Joe’s blog is shining a helpful light into that kind of behavior on the part of straight men. It’s certainly reinforcing my belief that it isn’t healthy.
This, for some reason, has been playing on my iPod almost constantly since I left Memphis…
I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh lord
Ive been waiting for this moment, all my life, oh lord
Can you feel it coming in the air tonight, oh lord, oh lord
Well, if you told me you were drowning
I would not lend a hand
Ive seen your face before my friend
But I don’t know if you know who I am
Well, I was there and I saw what you did
I saw it with my own two eyes
So you can wipe off the grin, I know where you’ve been
Its all been a pack of lies
And I can feel it coming in the air tonight, oh lord
Ive been waiting for this moment for all my life, oh lord
I can feel it in the air tonight, oh lord, oh lord
And I’ve been waiting for this moment all my life, oh lord, oh lord
Probably because I saw something while I was there that rekindled a long smoldering anger.
When I saw this photo on Made In Brazil, taken on a Paris fashion runway, at first I was disgusted. Then I thought about it some more and realized that nothing would piss off those fundamentalist nutcases like being made into a sex object. Take that al Qaeda…
Actually…I could see that as a fashion statement. There are lots of guys who would benefit enormously from having their faces hidden. Just not the rest of them…
There’s a kind of primitive variable that probably everyone who writes computer code knows and understands these days…the Boolean. Unlike other variables which can hold a range of values, be they numbers, or strings of ascii characters, the Boolean is a relentlessly either-or variable. And for that reason, it maps pretty well to the fundamental logic by which all digital computers operate, and to their smallest unit of data, the bit. But humans have been considering their world in Boolean logic ever since our minds first emerged from out of the biological background noise.
Yes-No. True-False. Right-Wrong. Good-Bad. Even as we admit to ourselves that there are often only shades of gray, we persist in reducing our experiences to these terms. It’s as basic an evaluation as can be. The second postulate of Aristotelian logic is that of ‘either-or’. A thing cannot both be, and at the same time not be. Either yes, or no. Either true, or false. Either right, or wrong. Either it is, or it is not. It must be one or the other.
Well…tell it to Schrodinger’s cat. It’s probably no coincidence that our machines are made in our image, that they resemble the way our minds like to think. The canvas always speaks of the artist. But as it turns out, that’s not actually the way our brains operate. It may not even be the way nature, at its most elemental level, works. There’s this intriguing tri-position logic in the natural world that I keep seeing raise its hand and wave at us from time to time. But it seems to go unexamined most of the time, and I think that’s because like the extra space-time dimensions physicists keep telling us are there, it’s hard for our minds to wrap themselves around it. And that’s really interesting, because one place you really see this tri-position logic is in how our brains actually physically work.
Consider the humble synapse. It is the gap between brain cells, across which two different kinds of chemical "messages" can cross. One kind of chemical causes the cell on the other side of the gap to fire. The other chemical inhibits the cell on the other side of the gap from firing. So far, so good. We’re still comfortably in the basic Boolean logic of things. Fire-Don’t fire. Yes-No. Off-On. Either-Or. But there’s a third thing that synapse can do: Nothing.
So synapse logic has three states, not two. Fire, don’t fire, and…what? Here’s where it gets interesting for me. What is the word here. We don’t really have one. And that I think, is because the concept is difficult for us. The state itself seems foreign enough to the way our minds naturally work, that as far as I know, humans don’t really have a good enough word for that third position. Neutral doesn’t quite do it. It isn’t that it isn’t engaged, like a gear shift you put into neutral, say. It’s connected, to the rest of the brain. ‘Off’ isn’t quite it either. Each half of the synaptic gap has a current state that influences the state of the cells on either side of the synaptic gap depending on the direction of the message, or the absence of one. So there are really three states possible here: Fire, don’t fire, and a third, that is neither fire or don’t fire. Depending on the state of the synapses it’s connected to, a brain cell may or may not fire. So the cell itself may have just two states. But the synapses have three.
Our minds just don’t seem to grasp that third logical state very well, and we fumble to describe it. It’s a between state. No…it’s a middle state. Wait…a transitional state… Uhm… No…it’s…it’s… (shrug) I dunno…
Maybe ‘zero’ is the right way to think about it. But I can only say that because I write software code and I understand how zero is actually something distinct from a positive value, is distinct from a negative value. But that seems to be a non-intuitive concept for us humans. Consider that the Arabic invention of the zero as a form of notation actually came well after a lot of other very basic mathematical concepts. Well of course everyone knew that you can have a zero quantity. But expressing it abstractly seemed to be a difficulty. And in many programming languages, 0 evaluates to false anyway, and any other value is true (except in Basic, where –1 is (was) true, which I think is right from a bitwise NOT sense…but don’t get me started…). And…this third position isn’t really a ‘nothing’. It’s more of a ‘neither’.
Another place you see this tri-position logic is natural selection. In the grand scheme of things, the winners are those organisms that are best adapted to their environment. Variation then, that gives an organism an advantage tends to be passed on, and variation that puts an organism at a disadvantage tends not to be passed on. Over time the advantages accumulate, and the disadvantages get culled out. Either-Or. But there is a third thing that can happen. Nothing. A variation can simply be neither an advantage nor a disadvantage. Those variations it seems, get placed in the genetic portfolio right along with the advantages too…
The most detailed probe yet into the workings of the human genome has led scientists to conclude that a cornerstone concept about the chemical code for life is badly flawed.
The ground-breaking study, published in more than two dozen papers in journals on both sides of the Atlantic, takes a small percentage of the genome to pieces to draw up a "parts list," identifying the biological role of every component.
For the international team of investigators, the four-year project was the computer-equivalent of passing a fine-toothed comb through a mountain of raw data.
Reporting in the British journal Nature and the US journal Genome Research on Thursday, they suggest that an established theory about the genome should be consigned to history.
Under this view, the genome is rather like a ribbon studded with some 22,000 "nuggets" in the form of genes, which make proteins, the essential stuff of life.
Genes — deemed so valuable that some discoverers of them have been prompted to file patents over them for commercial gain — amount to only around a twentieth, or even less, of the genetic code.
In between the genes and the sequences known to regulate their activity are long, tedious stretches that appear to do nothing. The term for them is "junk" DNA, reflecting the presumption that they are merely driftwood from our evolutionary past and have no biological function.
But the work by the ENCODE (ENCyclopaedia of DNA Elements) consortium implies that this nuggets-and-dross concept of DNA should be, well, junked.
The genome turns out to a highly complex, interwoven machine with very few inactive stretches, the researchers report.
Genes, it transpires, are just one of many types of DNA sequences that have a functional role.
And "junk" DNA turns out to have an essential role in regulating the protein-making business.
Previously written off as silent, it emerges as a singer with its own discreet voice, part of a vast, interacting molecular choir.
"The majority of the genome is copied, or transcribed, into RNA, which is the active molecule in our cells, relaying information from the archival DNA to the cellular machinery," said Tim Hubbard of the Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, a British research group that was part of the team.
"This is a remarkable finding, since most prior research suggested only a fraction of the genome was transcribed."
Francis Collins, director of the US National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI), which coralled 35 scientific groups from around the world into the ENCODE project, said the scientific community "will need to rethink some long-held views about what genes are and what they do."
"This could have significant implications for efforts to identify the DNA sequences involved in many human diseases," he said.
Another rethink is in offing about how the genome has evolved, said Collins.
Until now, researchers had thought that the pressure to survive would relentlessly sculpt the human genome, leaving it with a slim, efficient core of genes that are essential for biological function.
But the ENCODE consortium were surprised to find that the genome appears to be stuffed with functional elements that offer no identifiable benefits in terms of survival or reproduction.
The researchers speculate that there is a point behind this survival of the evolutionary cull. Humans could share with other animals a large pool of functional elements — a "warehouse" stuffed with a variety of tools on which each species can draw, enabling it to adapt according to its environmental niche.
IMO, there’s that third logical position at work again. The variation is neither good, nor bad, it’s just there. At some future point, say a rapid change in the organism’s environment, and that gene might be a handy thing to have all of a sudden. Or, conversely, it might turn into a complete disaster for the organism. But for the moment, it’s just there, evaluated to position three. Zero, let’s say. Neither positive nor negative. It has the potential to be either one, given a chance to express itself.
From somewhere deep in the physical fabric of the universe, Schrodinger’s cat licks its chops and smiles. Or doesn’t. Or both. Just don’t open the box.
The science fiction writer Larry Niven once averred that giving gay people what we want would be the quickest way of breeding us out of the population. But then, he didn’t get the fact that his Ringworld needed attitude jets until some real engineers pointed that fact out to him. I happen to think that having a gay minority does in fact provide a survival advantage to the human line. But as it turns out, homosexuality can fit comfortably into our gene pool just fine, along with a bazillion other random variations on a theme that simply are, and do no harm.
I don’t need to pass on my gay genes. My heterosexual brethren probably have them too…they just aren’t expressing them. For some reason, I expressed mine. But I’m fine with that, and so is nature. I happen to think it’s a plus. But the point is that a variation only gets culled out if it’s a minus. A really big minus. And this one isn’t.
It’s the holiday weekend, and I don’t feel like posting any heavy stuff here now. I’m busy with a bunch of home repair and improvement chores this weekend, and I just want to take a break from the world for now. I’ve got the deck to reseal, my iron handrails by the front steps and porch to clean and paint, and a bunch of pots to put flowers in. I don’t want to even look at the news for now. So I’m going to share a little family trick with the rest of you kids. How to make a jug of perfectly smooth and tasty sweet ice tea. I’ve no idea why so many people get it wrong, but most of the stuff I taste, particularly around here in Maryland, is too rough on the pallet. They like to make this "sun tea" for some reason, and it never tastes right to me.
Making ice tea right is really very simple. They seem to have the knack for it in the South, but I didn’t know that until I visited down there recently. Apparently sweet ice tea is a southern thing. I’ve no idea how my mom, a Pennsylvania Yankee, got the method figured out. I think it was just trial and error. But by the time I was 12 she had it down pat and when I was a kid I just loved summertime because it was ice tea time. Now I make it all the time. I generally have a tall glass of it somewhere nearby all day long.
I start by boiling a kettle of water. Filtered usually. There are two tricks to it. The first is to figure out how much sweetener you need for a given amount of boiling water beforehand. It isn’t sweetened to taste afterward, but before. I make about a kettle full, which works out to, I reckon, about a quart and a half, or about 48 ounces of water. So I know from experience that it takes about a quarter cup of sweetener. Your mileage may vary. I used to use pure sugar, which I bought by the 25 pound bag at Costco. But since I started watching my weight I’ve been using Splenda. It works just fine for me as a sugar substitute.
I put the sweetener in the empty jug first. When the water comes to a boil I pour it in over the sweetener, and it goes instantly into solution. Then I put in the tea bags. I just use plain old Lipton orange pekoe and pekoe tea bags. Three standard size bags work for me for this amount of water. Again, your mileage may vary. I’ll place the top on the jug loosely and walk away from it.
See, the second trick, and probably the most important, is to let the tea cool down at its own speed. Never, Never put it into the fridge before it’s at room temperature. It’ll go bitter when you do that, even if it’s just a little bit warm to the touch. Just let the jug cool off on its own to room temperature with the bags in it. It may take hours. That’s fine. I usually do a jug before bed and just leave it overnight. Once it’s at room temperature, then take the bags out, put the jug in the fridge and let it cool down.
That’s it. Nothing really special about it. But do it that way and you’ll get a nice, smooth sweet ice tea every time. You can add lemon, and maybe a touch of lime after you pour it into the glass.
Long Island Ice Tea is another story, for another time.
A British man has set a world record by making the first mobile telephone call from the summit of Mount Everest, taking the blessing — or curse — of the cell phone to new heights.
"It’s cold, it’s fantastic, the Himalayas are everywhere," Rod Baber said in the phone call from the top of the 8,848-metre (29,198-foot) peak…
No Shit? The Himalayas, did you say? And…like…is there snow everywhere up there too? Is it really high up there?
See? He’s on the fucking summit of Mount Everest, and you have to think that the thoughts in his head at that moment were actually some pretty profound ones. That is a rare and dangerous adventure. And he goes on that adventure…and he reaches the top. He did it. And the reward is a view of planet earth that few humans have ever seen with their own eyes. But then he puts the goddamned cell phone to his face and all the comes out is shopping mall babble. Cell phones just bring out the chattering little monkeys in all of us. I’m not busting on them…I’d hate to live in a world without them. But there will never be famous memorable words spoken into a cell phone.
LA PAZ, Bolivia – Always Coca-Cola? Not if Bolivia’s coca growers have their way. The farmers want the word "Coca" dropped by the U.S. soft drink company, arguing that the potent shrub belongs to the cultural heritage of this Andean nation, where the coca leaf infuses everyday life and is sacred to many.
A commission of coca industry representatives advising an assembly rewriting Bolivia’s constitution passed a resolution Wednesday calling on the Atlanta, Ga.-based company to take "Coca" out of its name and asking the United Nations to decriminalize the leaf.
The resolution demands that "international companies that include in their commercial name the name of coca (example: Coca Cola) refrain from using the name of the sacred leaf in their products."
The commission, which met for three days in Sucre, 255 miles southeast of La Paz, is part of an effort led by President Evo Morales to rehabilitate the image of plant, used in the Andes for millennia but better known internationally as the base ingredient of cocaine.
Oh they’ll get right on it I’m sure…
Coca-Cola released a statement Thursday saying their trademark is "the most valuable and recognized brand in the world" and was protected under Bolivian law.
I can appreciate the sentiment. I’d like it just fine thank you, if words on a product label actually meant things the way real words do. But you have to realize that a product label isn’t there to tell you what the product actually Is. Think of them as little mini advertisements that get put on cans and bottles and boxes of stuff. They’re there to make you buy whatever they’ve been pasted onto, not to tell you what it is you’re buying.
But let me put it this way: if an American food and beverage corporation can feel perfectly fine putting the words ‘Country’ and ‘Time’ and ‘Lemonade’ in the name of an instant drink mix product that is mass produced in factories and in no way shape or form has, or ever did have, any actual lemonade in it, then let’s face it, we’re doing pretty darn good that we can say Coca-Cola has any Cola in it at all, let alone any Coca.
Er…it does still have Cola in it…doesn’t it? Some? I don’t drink the stuff anymore myself…
"But then the sailors knelt and prayed, not all together but five or six at a time. Side by side they knelt down together . . . but there only prayed at the same time men of different faiths so that no god should hear two men praying to him at once. As soon as any one should finish his prayer, another of the same faith would take his place . . ."
"And I too felt I should pray, yet I liked not to pray to a jealous god there where the frail affectionate gods whom the heathen love were being humbly invoked; so I bethought me, instead, of Sheol Nugganoth, whom the men of the jungle have long since deserted, who is now unworhsipped and alone; and to him I prayed."
"Hell," the rabbi says, "is just like Heaven. It is a glorious banquet table spread with the finest foods. But the people in Hell are starving because they have no elbows and they cannot feed themselves."
"I see," the student says, "but in Heaven the people do have elbows?"
"No," the rabbi says, "the people in Heaven don’t have elbows either. But in Heaven, they feed each other."
Fred has a delightfully snarky photograph to go along with this blog post, titled, The Lost Tomb. It’s a tad hard to read the inscription, but the name is J. Cameron…
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